Larry the cat waiting at the door of 10 Downing Street in London, England. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)
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Britain, as it gets its seventh prime minister in ten years, is about to learn that a pleasing personality is no substitute for sound principles and policies. The U.S., and many other democracies, should take note.
Never before in British electoral history has there been such a turnover. And no wonder. The country remains mired in a sluggish economy, riddled with high costs and a dysfunctional, government-run healthcare system, not to mention a serious cultural and immigration crisis. Andy Burnham, the former mayor of Greater Manchester, may soon take over from the hapless incumbent, Sir Keir Starmer.
The Labour Party is in a panic. It won an overwhelming number of seats in the 2024 election but is now immensely unpopular. In recent local elections Labour was thrashed by the upstart Reform UK Party.
Putting aside Starmer’s wooden public persona and chronic indecisiveness, his successor has offered no plausible policies to turn around a very troubled country. In fact, some of Burnham’s past utterances, such as seizing British companies, massively boosting taxes on the rich—including a wealth tax—and rejoining the sclerotic, regulation-ridden EU, sound like socialist Senator Bernie Sanders on steroids. At least, Burnham’s now soft-peddling the EU notion.
Burnham is a proven-glad hander who knows how to charmingly converse with individuals. However, he’s displayed no substantive ideas that would actually make the Sceptred Isle the economic dynamo it once was thanks to Margaret Thatcher’s no-nonsense reforms. In 1979, when Thatcher took over 10 Downing Street, Britain was rightly labeled the economic sick man of Europe. By the time she was forced out office by her own Conservative Party in 1990, the country was the most vibrant large economy in the EU. She curbed the crippling power of unions, slashed tax rates—the highest income tax rate was cut from 98% to 40%— returned industries back to the private sector, which had been nationalized after WWII, and privatized large swaths of public housing. Millions of people in government-owned apartments could buy their abodes at cut-rate prices with attractive mortgages. She was a fierce critic of what became the EU.
But since Thatcher, Britain has descended into a condition that, in spirit, isn’t unlike that of the mid-1970s, when it had to turn to the IMF for an emergency bailout. It has become addicted to raising taxes and piling up debt. One huge blunder has been going all-out for very expensive, so-called renewable energy sources, which have sharply and unnecessarily raised the cost of electricity. Just as foolishly, Britain has severely hindered production of its North Sea oil and has refused to embrace fracking. Just a reminder, fracking has enabled the U.S. to move from being a huge importer of oil to becoming the world’s major producer of oil and natural gas. The UK also did little to curb massive and unpopular waves of immigration. In the name of cultural diversity, it turned a blind eye to scandalous assaults against women by immigrant gangs. Burnham shows no inclination to do what’s really needed to turn his country around.
The lesson is clear: Sound, pro-free market principles and programs work miracles in raising living standards and opening up opportunities for all people to get ahead.
In the U.S., Republicans are showing disturbing signs of beginning to lose sight of this truth as certain party eminences embrace pro-big labor nostrums. They also disdain the kind of tax cuts that Ronald Reagan enacted in the 1980s, which decisively reversed our own 1970s decline. One quick way to dispel such declinist tendencies would be for the Trump Administration to index capital gains for inflation—especially for housing—and to put forward a new, vigorous round of reductions in tax rates for individuals and commercial enterprises.